Porous carbon materials have long been used in capacitive deionization (CDI) technology. Capacitive deionization is increasingly being considered for large-scale desalination operations because of its lower operating costs. In CDI, salt water is made to flow between two porous electrodes, typically made of carbon. When an electric field is applied to render the electrodes opposite in polarity, positive ions become incorporated in the negatively-charged electrode while negative ions become incorporated in the positively-charged electrode. The stored ions can be subsequently released into a waste stream by reversing the electrode polarities.
However, CDI technology is currently significantly hampered by the difficulty in producing porous carbon films on a commercial scale in a batch-to-batch repeatable and uniform manner. The porous carbons produced until now (e.g., via resorcinol-formaldehyde reaction) leave little room for optimization and are generally hampered by the presence of microporosity and/or broad mesopore size distributions. Moreover, the porous carbon films currently in use in CDI technology (e.g., as prepared by standard resorcinol-formaldehyde template methodology) generally provide a significantly lower than optimal kinetic adsorption characteristic. Accordingly, there would be a particular benefit in a porous carbon material having improved adsorption and processing kinetics as applied to CDI technology, as well as a cost-effective and reliable method for its manufacture. There would be a further benefit if such a method did not use formaldehyde, a known toxin and carcinogen.